A Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance playable demo went live on the North American 3DS eShop today.

Oh, okay, Neku. I guess you don’t care.

The trial is set in the world of Traverse Town, where Sora and The World Ends With You‘s Neku meet for the first time. Players will able to recruit ally Dream Eaters (known as Spirits) and defeat enemy Dream Eaters (known as Nightmares), as well as a “colossal Nightmare beast.” You will also get a first crack at the new “Flowmotion” and “Reality Shift” features.

@KingOptimus111:
Absolutely :) Just finished playing both. Here we go:

Theathrhytm (or whatever it’s called) starts off with a short tutorial (which I believe can’t be skipped, which is lame for anyone retrying the demo), where you are show what to do in the Battle theme and field stages (no Cutscene stages on this demo for some weird reason). After that, you’re given the choice between just two musics (unfortunately): The amazing “Man with the Machine Gun” from FF VIII, a battle theme stage, and Sunleth Waterscape from FF XIII, a Field Music Stage.

Both tracks have three different difficulty levels: Beginner, Medium and Maniac. And let me tell you, the difference in difficulty is HUGE. You’d think the jump from easy to normal wouldn’t be that noticeable, but it is. The game is piss easy on easy, and really hard on normal. And I didn’t make it to the one minute mark on the hardest difficulty yet, lol. The screen prompts scroll by so fast on the hardest difficulty sometimes it’s hard to process all the information and do it on time. But thankfully there is a clever option to pratice any level, which is to say, you can play the songs to the end even when your HP drops, instead of getting game over and having to retry from the top. Coz yes, failing to hit the right notes will result in the enemy on screen attacking your party members, and your HP depleting. Scoring criticals will make your HP slowly replinish, but it isn’t easy to do so in the hardest difficulty levels. Then there are the summons. Not sure how many are there coz at least in the demo they were random. I got Shiva, Ifrit and Ramuh appearing every time I tried out the song, but they only appear if you score good notes in particular segments of the songs. And when they do, you’ll have to input a summoning attack sequence for them to unleash their special attacks (Shiva’s Diamond Dust, Ramuh’s Judment Bolt, Ifrit’s Hellfire…)

The Field Music stage is slightly easier imo than the battle music stage, even if it does take some getting used to. For the most part in this stage you keep the stylus on the screen and move it up and down, but in more than one time I found myself sliding the stylus all the way to the left, eventually hitting the borders of the screen and missing some notes (guess I was just too excited about the whole thing, lol). The summon sequences are replaced for Chocobo sequences, if you hit the notes right your character will start riding a chocobo and run faster. If you score enough criticals, a Moogle will give you a treasure chest. And before the stage starts, there are some notifications on the screen which indicate that some items are being used, and granting some stats and abilities to your characters (I’m guessing in the full game you’ll be able to equip special abilities or other items that give your party members some distinct abilities that make the game easier).

Moving on to Kingdom Hearts….

Dearly Beloved made me shiver with emotion. Seriously. I heard the new version of this song a long time ago for the first time and I kept hearing it ever since, but…I couldn’t help it :) You’re given the chance to play a tutorial, or jump right into the action. I started the tutorial first, to see what it was all about.

You’re given some basica explanation on how the game works. You start off with camera control explanation, some battle tips, how to attack, select your magic, lock on, etc. The way it plays is mostly similar to how Birth by Sleep did; you control the camera with the trigger buttons, and you press both to lock on whatever enemy you want, and push one or the other to select different targets. You use the Slide pad to move around, and the arrow keys to select the commands you’d want to be using from your deck. This battle is against Ursula, and you have Fire, Blizzard, a physical command attack (can’t remember the name but it’s really a simple movie) and 6 potions (which you won’t be needing, lol).

Then the tutorial goes on, and that’s when things become interesting. You’re given explanations on how the freeflow mechanics work, on the iconic Traverse town plaza. Basically, pressing the Y button when you run against a wall or a signpost or whatever, Sora starts jumping from wall to wall, or spinning around, and acting really fast. You can then proceed to other walls or signposts and keep moving really fast between the scenary, or attack your enemies with powerful attacks. Trust me, it’s hard to explain this but when you do it for the first time, it easily becomes second nature. In no time, you’re doing all kind of crazy things, moving around like a maniac. Another battle tutorial follows, but this time explaining how to use freeflow during a battle. Turns out you can use freeflow in some bigger enemies, and if you time the attacks right, use them as throwing tools in your combos. It’s both flashy and efficient, and everything works in such a fluid manner you just won’t believe how fun it is to play. The tutorial ends with some explanation on reality shift, how to activate it and such. Basically you can interact with some objects on the map, and then use the bottom touch screen to throw these objects around or do other interesting things. Tbh, I didn’t think this was that impressive, but it’s still nice of a feature to have in the game.

The tutorial ends, and I decided to start the demo at least. A cutscene plays out, you meet Neku, and after the cutscene you start the demo someplace else (it’s really weird lol, that they simply make you watch a cutscene and then fast forward the action to someplace else lol). You’re now in the company of three dream eater buddies, two of them fighting alongside you. You’re given the option to switch them around in the touch screen, and they’ll follow you wherever you go like Donald and Goofy did, teleporting right by your side at all times. At any time you can check out the tutorials again, but if you sat through the whole thing before, you won’t need it.

You’re then in this beautiful new area of traverse town, with lots of things to jump to and slide about. It’s a huge plaza, and you can jump from wall to wall, slide across the cables up to a tower, and fight enemies here and there. In this demo, Sora had the high jump ability and the (super?)glide abilities for some reason. This makes traversing the whole area even faster, since you can pretty much fly around using glide wherever you want, and then freeflow all the way up the stairs to the beginning….etc. No treasure chests whatsoever, but you can fight enemies in the roofs or some other hidden areas.

For this segment of the demo, you’re given once again new commands. There’s Cura, there’s Ballonra, there’s Sparkga….Sora is pretty much buffed up. And your dream eaters are decent party members, constantly attacking the enemies that show up. You can also link up with your dream eater companions, when the link bar is full: just click on their faces in the bottom screen, and Sora will execute a pair command with them, which differs depending on the dream eater you’re linking up with. Really fun.

After searching every nook and cranny, I moved on to another area of the demo. I climbed my way up, and a boss battle appears out of nowhere. The battle wasn’t particularly hard, and halfway through the whole thing the boss crashed the floor, which turned out to be a windowed roof, and both Sora, his companions and the boss fell down. The battle quickly resumed, and when I delivered the last strike, the demo ended.

Albeit undoubtly short, the demo was really fun to play. The game overall looks beautiful, it seems you’re playing a PS2 KH game. The music is amazing as well, and the game was really really fun and fast. I can’t wait for the both games now, being that KH was definitely the best out of these two.

Oh, for some weird reason the KH demo did not support the CPP…but to be honest, it was perfectly playable without it, since again, it plays like BBS. I’m guessing it will make things better, controlling the camera and whatanot but to anyone who doesn’t want the CPP, you really shouldn’t worry much about the lack of the peripheral, it won’t be really necessary.